Stanley Kubrick, Cinephile

I grew up watching Stanley Kubrick films. The first film that I have seen was Eyes Wide Shut in 1999 when I was 14 years old. I remember a book in our house about the great American directors which included Kubrick as well. Late 90's saw the rise of DVD's and I was lucky enough to find his earlier works. I have around 10 books on Kubrick in my home including the famous Taschen edition as well as Eyes Wide Open by Raphael Frederick which only had only one publication. (I have it!)
We have very few interviews of him but we know one thing for sure, he was a cinephile. BFI published a new post about Kubrick's obsession with cinema as well as his favourite ten films.
It is great to revisit pioneers of cinema especially from the silent era.
There was a time in my life where I had time to watch films as much as I could. Yes those were the days when I was a student and I could just grab a film and study it. In Helsinki, I could see those pictures in cinema with black and white film projection. How lucky was I!
I know there will be time again in my life where I will be able to revisit these films.
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Words and Movies by Stanley Kubrick

The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. I t will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book's psychological content, will accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.
I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly ties-up ideas. The point of view it is conveying has to be completely entwined with a sense of life as it is, and has to be got across through a subtle injection into the audience's consciousness. Ideas which are valid and truthful are so multi-faceted that they don't yield themselves to frontal assault. The ideas have to be discovered by the audience, and their thrill in making the discovery makes those ideas all the more powerful. You use the audience's thrill of surprise and discovery to reinforce your ideas, rather than reinforce them artificially through plot points or phoney drama or phoney stage dynamics put in to power them across.
It's sometimes said that a great novel makes a less promising basis for a film than a novel which is merely good. I don't think that adapting great novels presents any special problems which are not involved in adapting good novels or mediocre novels; except that you will be more heavily criticised if the film is bad, and you may be even if it's good. I think almost any novel can be successfully adapted, provided it is not one whose aesthetic integrity is lost along with its length. For example, the kind of novel in which a great deal and variety of action is absolutely essential to the story, so that it loses much of its point when you subtract heavily from the number of events on their development.
People have asked me how it is possible to make a film out of Lolita when so much of the quality of the book depends on Nabokov's prose style. But to take the prose style as any more that just a part of a great book is simply misunderstanding just what a great book is. Of course, the quality of the writing is one of the elements that make a novel great. But this quality is a result of the quality of the writer's obsession with his subject, with a theme and a concept and a view of life and an understanding of character. Style is what an artist uses to fascinate the beholder in order to convey him his feelings and emotions and thought. These are what have to be dramatised, not the style. The dramatising has to find a style of its own, as it will do if it really grasps the content. And in doing this it will bring out another side of that structure which has gone into the novel. It may or may not be as good as the novel; sometimes it may in certain ways be even better.

Interview with Stanley Kubrick

I just found an interview with Stanley Kubrick conducted by Jeremy Bernstein in November 27, 1966. Kubrick never liked interviews therefore we have so few with him. This one is quite interesting. In 1966, Kubrick had just finished Dr. Strangelove and was working for his new feature, an adaptation from an Arthur C. Clark novel, A Space Odyssey: 2001.
Near the end of the interview, he discusses director's relationship with editing:

With the exception of a few directors, like David Lean and, well let’s not say who, but with the exception of a few directors, most people have their film edited by film editors as they go along. And then, when the film is done, they look at the film and dictate some notes about it and the film editor tries to do what they say and then maybe they look at it again and they do it again. But basically it’s like trying to, say, redesign a city by driving through it in a car, you know. You can notice a few things and say, you know, “put that traffic light in the middle of the street” or “those buildings over there look kind of shabby” or something, but if you really want to do it right, you must do it yourself, you know, piece by piece. So, I think by now I have enough, sort of, ability to imagine the way a scene will come out so that I can tell without editing the material if I have enough film coverage and, you know, what I can do with it, and then I edit the film with the editor myself when the film is… when I’m all finished.

I would also like to mention a wonderful book about Stanley Kubrick "Eyes Wide Open" written by Frederic Raphael who wrote the screenplay of Eyes Wide Shut. The book is about his collaboration with the director while working on the screenplay in the early 90's. It was just published after the death of Kubrick and the release of the film in 1999. However Kubrick family set against the book because it was published without their permission and the family accused him for not having respect for privacy and writing a memoir on Kubrick with inaccurate information.
After a very long search, a friend of mine found the book for me in New York and gave it to me.
Although I am not sure about the accuracy of information written in the book, I just love this piece of dialog.

S.K.: I don't know. We can talk about that. We'll have to. Do you want to work on it or not?
F.R.: Of course I do. I was afraid it might be science fiction.
S.K.: Don't you like science fiction?
F.R.: I never read it. I never feel remotely interested in people who are going to be alive three centuries after I'm dead, do you?
S.K.: I don't know about people. Situations, yes!